Monday, June 28, 2010

The CIA's Death Squad Body Count Continues to Pile Up

President Bush tours Latin America as his newly-empowered CIA death squads rub out all those opposed to U.S. corporate interests and their local power-hungry surrogates. The latest victims:

The Archbishop of Cali, Colombia Isaias Duarte was shot and killed in front of a church on March 17. He had previously claimed legislative candidates were receiving drug money. However, the only "recognized" candidates are those who support the Colombian oligarchy, supported by the right-wing paramilitaries (also involved in cocaine), the US-trained military, the CIA, and CIA front companies like Dyncorp, MPRI, and East, Inc. So Archbishop Duarte became a "target of opportunity" (or a "terrorist" to use the language of our mentally-impaired President Bush). The Colombian government, of course, blamed "leftist guerrillas" for Duarte's death). The right-wing death squads in El Salvador tried the same line in 1980 when they, in fact, killed, with the support of the CIA and its local intelligence agency ANSESAL, Archbishop Oscar Romero. Those death squads were aided and abetted at the time by State Dept. operative Elliott Abrams, now the human rights coordinator for the National Security Council in the American unconstitutional regime of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld.

The same day that the Archbishop was assassinated, Jorge Rosal Zea, the head of operations for Guatemala's Patriot Party in Suchitepequez Province was gunned down by several men waiting in a parked car. The assassination came a few days after Rosal Zea led a 3,000-person demonstration and called for the resignations of President Alfonso Portillo and Vice President Juan Francisco Reyes, both stooges of the CIA and its minions who now control U.S. Latin American policy in the State Department and National Security Council. Portillo, his personal secretary, and Reyes have been accused by opponents of opening secret bank accounts in Panama to embezzle millions of dollars in public funds. It is a familiar pattern for CIA surrogates who have done similar things in the past (Marcos in the Philippines, Noriega in Panama, and Somoza in Nicaragua).

Mar 10, Sao Paulo, Brazil -- Mikael "Mike" Nassar and his wife Marie Noel Nassar were shot to death at a gas station after one their car's tires was punctured. Nassar is a former Lebanese Phalangist leader and associate of Elie Hobeika, who was assassinated on January 24 in Lebanon. Hobeika and Nassar were prepated to testify against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a Belgian war crimes tribunal for his role in the 1982 massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Chatilla in Beirut.

Angola -- Just like the CIA-Mossad team of convenience takes out a second threat to Sharon, another threat to the oil oligarchy of Angola removed a second threat to it. Antonio Dembo, the moderate successor to UNITA chief Jonas Savimbi, was reported to have been killed on March 7. Dembo was considered the best choice to lead UNITA into peace talks with the government. The CIA disinformation machine claimed Dembo died from complications of diabetes. And Patrice Lumumba died from lead poisoning!

March 1 2002

J'ACCUSE ENCORE: BUSH'S DEATH SQUADS

Angola and Colombia Postscripts

1 March 2002: From Colombia's El Tiempo 2/28, the FARC's key guerilla leader Salvador "Silverio" Vargas Leon "was killed" during an "exchange" between 54 rebels and the military. Bush's death squads are carefully eliminating every opponent of the U.S. oil mega-corplex. The Colombian attack was supported by US Blackhawk helicopters that are maintained by CIA and Pentagon front companies like Dyncorp and EAST, Inc. Silveiro's bloody corpse was displayed for journalists at an army base in Bogota. This is what the Angolans did with Jonas Savimbi's body just a few days before. Bush claims he is a born-again Christian but his CIA minions seem to prefer macabre "un-Christian" rituals of displaying murdered bodies.

***

22 February 2002

J'ACCUSE - ENCORE: BUSH'S DEATH SQUADS

This is an update to my previous article (below) concerning the CIA's new unbridled authority to assassinate political nuisances to U.S. interests around the world. In Bush's "New World Order of "if you're not with us, you're against us," social activists and progressive political leaders everywhere are now within the crosshairs of the CIA and its local notorious surrogates and warlords. America's traditional concepts of human rights have been relegated to the dustbin of history in post-constitutional corporate statist America.

In fact, the National Security Council's point man for human rights is none other than the infamous Reagan era State Department official Elliott Abrams, the mollycoddler of the death squads in El Salvador and the contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

He is assisted by terrorist supporter Otto Reich, in charge of the Latin American Bureau at the State Department. Reich is the most vile of right-wing Cubans who were brought into the United States by the CIA after Castro took power. Reich supported the release from a Venezuelan jail of Orlando Bosch, a Cuban terrorist who planted a bomb on an Air Cubana plane in 1976.

That Boeing passenger jet, owned by Air Canada and leased to Cubana, exploded and crashed in 1976 off the east coast of Barbados. Many of my US Navy colleagues at the US Naval Facility on Barbados, where I arrived for duty in 1977, often recounted the horrible stories of their helping Barbadian police and fishermen haul body parts and the bodies of young children and babies out of the Caribbean that awful October day.

And let us not forget U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte, the former US Ambassador to Honduras who had his own dealings with the local death squads.

Today, a former U.S. intelligence asset, Dr. Jonas Savimbi, was killed by Angolan Army units in eastern Angola. His is the sixth major assassination of a political leader since Bush unleashed his CIA death squads. If one includes the late Royal Family of Nepal and the late Congolese President Laurent Desire Kabila (assassinated just 4 days before Bush was sworn in as President), the number of those dispatched climbs even higher.

Savimbi's continued presence in Angola did not suit the interests of U.S. oil companies that are increasing their operations in the country. For that reason, the United States has permitted a number of CIA and Pentagon fronts, like Air Scan, MPRI, and Dyncorp, to provide military assistance to the Angolan Army. It seems that the training and logistics finally paid off with the killing of Savimbi.

For similar reasons, the Colombian oligarchy, armed with US provided aircraft and intelligence, launched a blitzkrieg at the exclusion zone of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Colombian Army is supoprted by some of the same CIA and Pentagon fronts operating in Angola. This attack on the FARC occured as Angola's US-backed Army launched its attack on Savimbi's UNITA forces. The US military offensive in Colombia is also tied to oil. The Bush oil clique wants nothing to pose a threat to the oil pipelines in the area, including the Cao Limon pipeline in the north and the Amazon-Esmerldas pipeline in Ecuador.

It was not the phony drug war that pushed the Bush regime to declare war on Colombia's opposition -- God knows, the Bushes have been both suppliers and demanders for various drugs -- but their revivalistic fervor in making the developing world safe for oil industry exploitation.

SIDEBAR:

Apparently, intelligence agencies allied to the United States, like those of India (a new "strategic partner" of the United States in the "War on Terrorism" and the "War to Protect Regional U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Interests"), have decided to take a cue from President Bush's "shoot to kill" order against activists and independence leaders.

On February 11, a senior separatist leader of the Tripura (northeast India) independence movement was shot and killed by Indian security forces. The assassinated leader was Benjamin Hrangkhawl, a senior leader of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), a Christian-dominated separatist group. Hrangkhawl had arrived in Tripura from neighboring Bangladesh.

According to the BBC, the state Police Intelligence Chief Kishore Jha, said the killing of Mr Hrangkhawl was "a major success." Indian intelligence is now pressing Bhutan and Bangladesh to arrest and extradite separatist refugees in those countries.

The King of Bhutan and Prime Minister of Bangladesh might want to look at what happened to the entire Royal Family of Nepal last June when the late King decided to negotiate with leftist guerrillas rather than fight them. According to unblemished sources in Kathmandu, the king and his family were quickly dispatched by a Nepali army commando unit trained at the time by U.S. Special Operations forces sent by US Pacific Commander in Chief Adm. Dennis Blair (he's the same guy who propped up Gen. Wiranto with special training while the good general was committing genocide in East Timor).

What was to become the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (PSYOPs division) prepared a story, with the assistance of India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence agency, that the King and his family were murdered as a result of the Crown Prince going nuts with automatic weapons after being forlorn over his mother's refusal to allow him to marry a commoner. The entire Western media bought that story faster than George Bush nosediving after choking on a pretzel. The media also bought that one.

And---

the tally so far in anti-terrorism assassinations is: Assassinated: 5 Christians, 1 non-radical Muslim. If I understand Bush correctly, I thought the Christians were the good guys and the Muslims were the "evil doers."

Today, The Washington Post ran the fifth segment in its series on what transpired within the Bush Cabinet in the aftermath of September 11. Of particular interest is what CIA Director George Tenet brought to the table at Camp David last September 15. According to the article by Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, when Tenet produced a Top Secret "Worldwide Attack Matrix" that specified targets in 80 countries around the world, he sought unprecedented authority to simply assassinate foreign terrorists directly or though allied intelligence services. The CIA even prepared a "Memorandum of Notification" which would allow the agency to have virtual carte blanche to conduct political assasinations abroad. This Memorandum trumped previous mechanisms by which the President would authorize intelligence actions (but not assassinations) through individual Presidential Findings. The fail safe mechanisms established under the administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton were simply erased at the urging of Tenet. In light of these revelations, what was authorized by the President may have led to the assassinations of a number of human rights and ethnic leaders not connected in any way with Al Qaeda but did represent bothersome roadblocks to a number of U.S. military and corporate interests.

It now seems likely, given the unprecedented "license to kill" President Bush granted to the CIA, there was U.S. complicity in the murders of the following individuals. Human rights commissions and war crime tribunals in Belgium and France should take a close look at these likely criminal misadventures:

1. Theys Eluay. Today, the Indonesian army chief, General Endriartono Sutarto, confirmed in Jakarta that West Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay was assassinated by Indonesian Army units after he was kidnapped last November 11. The assassins were members of KOPASSUS, a special operations unit trained by U.S. Special Forces and CIA personnel and was involved in massacres in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation of that country. In 1969, West Papua was formally handed over to Indonesia by the United Nations after a referendum, now widely recognized as rigged, determined that the non-Indonesian population wanted to be Indonesian. Eluay was a thorn in the side of Freeport McMoran, a Louisiana-based mining company that has pillaged West Papua's natural resources and has been accused by local activists of propping up local Indonesian army and KOPASSUS officers with bribes and favors. Henry Kissinger serves as a Director Emeritus on the board of directors of Freeport and former Louisiana Senator J. Bennett Johnston, recently identified as a lobbyist for Enron, serves as a full member of the board.

2. Abdullah Syafii. On January 22, 2002, Indonesian army troops assassinated the military commander of the Free Aceh Movement, Abdullah Syafii. The Free Aceh Movement demands independence for Aceh, a region in northwest Sumatra, and is a member of the non-violent Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), an international organization headquartered in the Netherlands. It has also been at loggerheads with ExxonMobil, which has extensive drilling and refining operations in the territory. Aceh's Governor Abdullah Puteh, who is claimed by local activists to be on the payroll of ExxonMobil, had written a letter to Syafii inviting him to attend peace talks with the government. Syafii's lieutenants claim that the letter contained a small microchip that permitted Indonesian KOPASSUS troops to track him down and ambush him. The operation has all the earmarks of the CIA, which can rely on National Security Agency (NSA) satellites to track such microchip transponders.

3. Elie Hobeika. Elie Hobeika was the head of the Lebanese Forces militia, a right-wing Christian army that was allied with Israel during its 1982 occupation of Beirut. Although Hobeika was in charge of the Christian forces that massacred hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps that year, he had irrefutable evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had authorized the mass murder in his role as Israeli Defense Minister. An official Israeli commission of inquiry found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacres. Hobeika was going to testify against Sharon at an upcoming Belgian war crimes tribunal which has already indicted Sharon for the war crimes. It was that testimony that resulted in Hobeika being silenced by a Mossad car bomb that exploded near his SUV near Beirut. The bomb killed Hobeika and his bodyguards. The CIA, now closely allied with Mossad, is said to have given its approval for the action.

4. Chief Bola Ige. On December 23, 2001, Chief Bola Ige, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Nigeria, was assassinated in the bedroom of his home in Ibadan by unknown gunmen. Ige was a leader of the Yorubas, a largely Christian ethnic group that has championed the cause of southern Nigerian Christian tribes like the Igbo, Ogoni, and Yoruba that maintain grievances against exploitative Western oil companies that have spoiled their lands with pollution and pocketed most of the oil revenues for themselves and corrupt Nigerian politicians. Ige was the presidential candidate of the pan-Yoruba Alliance for Democracy but lost to the current President Olusegun Obasanjo, a former general who is thought by many Nigerians to be in the hip pocket of western oil companies, including Chevron and ExxonMobil. A lucrative CIA and Pentagon front operation, the private military contractor MPRI, has been training special units of the Nigerian armed forces. These forces have been active in putting down anti-oil industry protests by Igbo, Ogoni, and Yoruba tribal peoples along the Nigerian coast. Michael J. Boskin, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush I is a member of the Exxon Mobil board, while current National Security Adviser Condolleezza Rice served on the board of Chevron. Currently serving on Chevron's Board is Bush I trade representative Carla Hills and former Louisiana Senator Johnston, who also serves on the board of Freeport McMoran.

In all likelihood all of these assassinations were likely known to the CIA and allowed to take place unhindered. The killings all directly benefitted the interests of the US military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so poignantly warned us about some 40 years ago.

****

I more or less predicted the Indonesian murders a few months ago (just after Tenet received authorization to conduct assassinations of "terrorists") during an interview with Radio Singapore International. The transcript of that broadcast follows:

CIA assassination missions - a look into the implications of this US Foreign policy

Wayne Madsen, a former Intelligence Officer at the National Security Agency in Washington with this comment.

"When Senator Frank Church had a committee in the Senate that found out that the CIA was conducting assassination missions against foreign leaders and they passed very stringent laws against the CIA to prevent any abuses. And now what we're hearing is that the late Senator Church went too far. Well Senator Church was responding to some very severe abuses of authority by the CIA. And now we're hearing basically history is being changed on us here and we're hearing that Senator Church went too far in what he did.

And I think its very important now to understand that these things are all in context and what people like Senator Frank Church did in the 1970s really still applies today."

If CIA assassination missions are taken beyond the present operations in Afghanistan to other countries where terrorists are known to be operating, what sort of repercussions will this present for country to country relations? A concern I posed to Wayne Madsen.

"Especially in countries in South East Asia, we have a President who is very much in it with the US multi-national companies. What if they decide that West Papua independence movement in Irian Jaya - West Papua - could be a terrorist organization. And they could decide well we're going to target their leadership for assassination because they happen to be against the interests of Freeport McMoran - one of the biggest mining companies in West Papua. Or what if they decide that the Aceh movement in Northern Sumatra happens to be â€¦â€¦. to the interests of Exxon Mobil corporation, and they decide to target their leadership for assassination. I think this is the problem with this type of wide sweeping authorization to assassinate foreign leaders. We may find ourselves assassinating people because they just so happen to be against US interests. "

Friday, June 25, 2010

Tom Engelhardt argues that most of the American public is oblivious to how the US government is garrisoning the planet, how we have long been in a perpetual state of war and other topics from his new book "The American Way of War."

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Text with video:RTAmerica — June 17, 2010 — BP CEO Tony Hayward was on Capitol Hill facing the ire of US politicians, but Brent Budowsky, columnist for The Hill, says that the responsibility for the oil spill lies with every american president since Jimmy Carter and the politicians who are too reliant on the money from big oil. Budowsky hopes that this may be one of those moments that changes the system like World War II, Watergate or 9/11, that will change the way we do business on energy.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Text with video:RussiaToday—June 07, 2010 — On this edition of Peter Lavelle's CrossTalk, he asks his guests whether de-criminalizing illegal drugs is the real solution to the "war on drugs".

Would the the main banks in the US fail if there wasn't a global CIA heroin and cocaine smuggling ring? Would there be two wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan? Would the US Constitution still be valid? Maybe this post will answer those questions:

In 1980, there were 500,000 inmates in the US. Today there is 2.3 million. The US has 25 percent of the world's population of inmates. These statistics were obtained by listening to an expert in the above video recite the numbers. It is almost at the end of the video.

UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox (Fox dismisses gay smears ) has Luke Coffey, a man with links to the CIA, as a special adviser.

Liam Fox is said to want the UK to buy American, rather than British, military equipment.

Luke Coffey runs the London branch of an American think tank called Censa (Council for Emerging National Security Affairs).

At least a quarter of the members listed on its website have been in the CIA or other American intelligence agencies.

Luke Coffey has been issued with a pass giving him access to all areas of the Ministry of Defence.

Lord Moonie3. The Americans seem to have very strong links to certain UK politicians and people in the military.

The Sunday Herald discovered that about half the parliamentary questions tabled by Lord Moonie, the former UK defence minister, 'relate to areas of commercial interest to US-based Northrop Grumman Corporation.'

Sir Robert Walmsley, former head of UK defence procurement, procured himself a job as director of US arms firm the EDO Corporation.

Admiral lord Boyce, the chief of the UK defence staff who retired in 2003, became an adviser to the American Computer Sciences Corporation in 2004. Boyce told Private Eye that he advised CSC on its bid for a £6 billion defence contract.

"When Gordon Brown was a student at the University of Edinburgh… the young Labour and anti-apartheid activist was handed a list by an individual known to be a top CIA agent based in Britain.

"On the list were the names of a number of British socialists and anti-apartheid activists. Although Brown was said not to have known of his American contact's intelligence ties at the time, the British intelligence sources revealed that Brown has been on the CIA's payroll ever since he took possession of the list." - Columns: 'Washington watch' by Tumbler Prospect Magazine July ...

Leyland ceased to exist. Iberdrola took over Scottish Power. Ferrovial took over BAA...

6. Many of Britian's top companies have disappeared or been taken over.

BP may be next.

"The most startling takeover target of the year will be BP, which will attract interest from Exxon Mobil... With the crude oil price falling to its lowest level since the 1990s, BP will be historically cheap by most measures..." - After a year of shocks, prepare for more in 2009

Victor Rothschild worked for the British security services. Was he also working for Mossad?

9. In 1965 Angleton, and President Johnson, decided to commission a report on Britain's secret services.

This report recommended sending more spies to Britain.

It seemed that the CIA was going to treat Britain like Indonesia or Pakistan.

In order to ensure that there was an elite which would support US interests, the CIA would try to gain control of MI5 and MI6, use dirty tricks to get rid of anti-American politicians, and place pro-American puppets into positions of power.

In 1996, in the Guardian, Martin Kettle suggested that New Labour was all about Britain being in with the Americans.

10. In a talk to Labour Party branches in 1996, Robin Ramsay (Lobster Magazine) pointed out some interesting links between New labour and the USA:

Jonathan Powell, Blair's top man in Downing Street, used to work in Britain's Washington embassy and is suspected by some of having been our spook liaising with the CIA.

Former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband is the son of a Jewish Marxist.

Top Blair aide David Milliband did a degree at the USA's MIT and Brown's top aid Edward Balls went to Harvard.

Gordon Brown spent his holidays in the library at Harvard.

The US encouraged large numbers of Labour MPs to take free trips to America (Israel also invited a large number of Labour MPs to Israel).

In 1986 Tony Blair went on a US-sponsored trip to America and came back a supporter of the nuclear deterrent.

In 1993 Blair attended a Bilderberg Group meeting (secretive right wing organisation) and not long afterwards became Labour leader.

Four of the Blair cabinet were members of the Anglo-American elite group the British American Project; three of the Blair cabinet attended Bilderberg meetings.

Peter Mandelson become Chair of British Youth Council which began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which was set up and financed by MI6 and then taken over by the CIA in the 1950s.

And the unions?

According to Ramsay: "The CIA also ran the anti-communist international trade union movement, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the ICFTU...

By the mid 1950s nearly a quarter of the TUC's annual budget was going to the ICFTU, a CIA operation.

There is no suggestion that he acted improperly or had prior knowledge that the company was to face the biggest setback in its history.

His decision, however, means he avoided losing more than £423,000 when BP’s share price plunged after the oil spill began six weeks ago.

Since he disposed of 223,288 shares on March 17, the company’s share price has fallen by 30 per cent. About £40 billion has been wiped off its total value. The fall has caused pain not just for BP shareholders, but also for millions of company pension funds and small investors who have money held in tracker funds.

The spill, which has still not been stemmed, has caused a serious environmental crisis and is estimated to cost BP up to £40 billion to clean up.

There was growing confidence yesterday that a new cap placed over the well was stemming the oil flow. An estimated three million litres a day had been pouring into the sea off the coast of Louisiana since the April 20 explosion, damaging marine life.

The crisis has enraged US politicians, with President Obama yesterday forced to cancel a trip to Indonesia amid a row over the White House’s response.

Mr Hayward, whose position is thought to be under threat, risked further fury by continuing plans to pay out a dividend to investors next month.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Police can give speeding tickets if they 'think' car is going too fast

Posted: 05:47 PM ET

FROM CNN's Jack Cafferty:

In Ohio, if a cop says it looked like you were speeding, he can write you a ticket - no proof needed. Makes things so much easier for law enforcement if they don't have to be bothered with the burden of proof. True story.

The state's supreme court ruled five-to-one that independent verification of a driver's speed isn't necessary... things like laser guns or radar or actually clocking how fast you're going. The court says an officer's visual estimate will work as long as the officer is trained, certified by a training academy and experienced in finding speeders.

Supporters say that officers undergo extensive training where they have to visually estimate the speed of vehicles within one or two miles per hour of the actual speed.

Nonetheless, law enforcement officials insist they won't be getting rid of their speed guns; and that it's rare for officers to give tickets based solely on their observations. But the state's highest court says if they want to, it's quite all right.

The case stemmed from the appeal of a traffic ticket issued near Akron, Ohio in 2008.

In that case, a police officer ticketed a driver because he said it looked like the driver was going too fast.

Without any technical assistance, the cop determined that the motorist was going 70 miles-per-hour when the speed limit was 60. The driver says the court's decision "stinks." The driver is right.

Here's my question to you: What else will police be able to do without proof if they can now give speeding tickets if they simply "think" a car is going too fast?

Tune in to the Situation Room at 6pm to see if Jack reads your answer on air.

And, we love to know where you’re writing from, so please include your city and state with your comment.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Text with video:videonation—May 24, 2010 — Richard Kim, Senior Editor of The Nation magazine, and marchers from the April 29 march on Wall Street share their view of Wall Street's role in the financial crisis. For updates on the financial reform bill, go to www.thenation.com.